System of a Down singer Serj Tankian has made a questian and answer session oh his Youtube Channel, and gave some news about his personal life.
In the video, Serj explained why he started painting. He said:
“Originally, I started painting because of my music. My whole kind of foray into the art world was, ‘What does my musical piece look like?’. I wanted to see what a certain piece of music looked like, and so the first piece I did was a representation of a musical composition I have done on piano, and I even put in the musical clefts and notes using clocks without arms and stuff like that and painted the whole thing.
It’s one of those things where when you’re an artist as far as a musician but you’re not a visual artist and suddenly you make a piece of visual art, you stand in front of it and you’re like, ‘Is this shit, or is it good?’. And I really liked it.
I looked at it and I was, ‘Wow, this is really, really unique.’ Just as objective as I can be, and I’m like, ‘That’s really interesting’. The whole idea of musically-composed paintings is something that I’ve been interested in for a long time as an artist.
I’ve always wanted to go to an exhibition, put on headphones and listen to pieces of music, just like films.
Paintings to me are the same thing; there’s no moving visuals, but if you really look into them, you can see them moving, especially with music. We started doing that along with an app that allows for optical recognition, you know, listening to the music, and it became an adventure.
Years ago, I remember a journalist asked me, ‘How would you describe System of a Down’s music?’. And without really thinking, just intuitively, I think I said something like, ‘It’s like a violent violin in the middle of a windstorm,’ which makes total sense, because the wind would be propelling the bow of the violin and it would be a very violent kind of musical entropy, if you will.
A lot of the things I’ve said in the past that are kind of poetic quotes or things like that have kind been of marked in my mind, so when I had the opportunity to create visual ideas from them, I was able to.
The particular violin that I used I got from Armenia years ago. I was at the airport and they wouldn’t let me take it out of the country.
It wasn’t an expensive violin or anything, it was just probably a student violin or something like that, but at the time, I faked my way that I could play the violin so that I can prove that it was my violin and I could take it out of the country because I just wanted a musical element from Armenia to hang onto.
Years later, I painted it white and stabbed it with its own bow so that the ‘blood’ would spurt out of it. I might’ve been watching ‘Dexter’ a lot on telly, but it’s just the idea of a violent violin.
It’s kind of like I find opposite meanings in things, so a violin usually tends to correlate with a very beautiful setting, classical music, sweeping kind of vibe, pretty. I wanted it to be ugly and notorious, and destitute. I was trying to find a reverse definition in an item, in an artistic sense.”
Watch the video below. Click here to source of the statement.
